The IT industry is made up of two kinds of people: those who manage workloads and those who don’t. For the former, there are a lot of tools to help them decide how to allocate computing resources among various tasks, including scheduling and job management systems, partitioning software, and automated workload management tools.
For the latter, the options are more limited. You can try to trick people into thinking you’re managing workloads by downloading a bunch of open-source software and laying it out on your desk in a very impressive-looking way. Or you can just do what all the smart people do: Get yourself a workload management tool.
There’s no reason everyone else should get to have all the fun just because they know how to use technology. Let us show you how to harness the power of workload management tools for your personal benefit by applying them in some non-computing contexts.
Worried about the complexity of managing multiple workloads across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments? Learn how to automate and optimize your IT operations with a workload management tool that offers cloud integration and virtualization.
There are many benefits to adopting a workload management tool — you can shift workloads across various environments, improve resource utilization and streamline management processes. In this article, RisePath will help you understand how they work, the main features they offer and the best ways to use them.
What Is A Workload Management Tool?
Workload management tools allow administrators to manage large numbers of virtual desktops, applications and servers in a single platform. The tools are designed to minimize the need for multiple management tools — instead, they can control all aspects of an environment from a single location.
Some administrators consider them interchangeable with cloud systems management software, though workload management tools usually focus more on virtualized environments. Workload orchestration software can also be managed from a single platform, but it focuses on automating tasks across multiple platforms or locations.
When talking about workload management tools it is important to know that there are many different categories of workload management tools. These include:
- Virtualization tools
- Software defined storage (SDS)
- Software defined networking (SDN)
- Data center automation (DCA)
- Data center orchestration and management
- Cloud management platforms (CMP)
These workload management tools vary widely in terms of the functions they provide, the value they deliver and the ease of use.
Workload management tools are a must-have for any enterprise, but not every workload management tool is built the same. A poorly designed or implemented workload management can actually hinder your efforts to optimize and automate your data center.
Here’s how to find the right system for your needs:
- Don’t assume that one size fits all. There are many different types of workloads, and each one needs to be managed differently.
- Consider the impact on your budget, including the initial investment and ongoing costs.
- Ask about scalability and what steps you may need to take as your data center grows.
Workload management tools are used by academic and research institutions to schedule jobs on high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Much like a job scheduler on a mainframe, these systems allow users to submit a series of commands to be executed in sequence or in parallel in the order specified by the user.
The key difference between a typical job scheduler and workload management tools is that the latter has more capabilities for scheduling and executing jobs on clusters. While job schedulers can handle a variety of tasks, workload managers are designed specifically for task-intensive environments where the execution of jobs can vary significantly in size, length and resource requirements.
It assigns, organizes and tracks tasks to make sure work gets done on time. And it gives you the data to see how much is being done and by whom, so you can make better decisions about workloads.
With a workload management tool, you can:
- Make sure projects are moving forward and that deadlines are being met
- Get more visibility into how much work people are doing
- Free up time for your team members so they can focus on their most important tasks
Workload management tools are a combination of processes, technologies, and policies that maintain an optimal balance between user demand and available IT resources. They also let you manage multiple projects in a timely manner to ensure each project gets the resources it needs to succeed.
The goal of workload management is to optimize your performance without overloading your system. If your workload is too high, your team might not be able to keep up. If it’s too low, you won’t make the most efficient use of your system’s capabilities. Either way, inefficiencies can drastically impact cost and quality.
- Workload management tools can help you avoid these problems by:
- Automatically assigning resources where they’re needed most
- Reducing waste associated with under-utilized resources
- Ensuring limited system resources are used efficiently
- Improving user satisfaction by reducing downtime
They’re essential to ensure fair sharing of resources, as well as maximizing utilization and job throughput.
At least in the medium term, many professions will be redefined instead of abolished as the automation of intellectual and psychical labor progresses. And even in the long term, most workers will see their roles and how they spend their time transformed in ways they may not anticipate or even welcome.
As this happens, companies will have to redesign jobs and work processes, retrain and redeploy workers, and realign their management systems and company cultures. They will also have to rethink how they organize work–what kinds of tasks are performed by people (and machines) versus those done by algorithms.
The good news is that these changes needn’t be as disruptive as some fear. The adoption of steam engines during the Industrial Revolution provides some assurance here: though some tasks were replaced by machinery, other new tasks were created in response to the increased productivity brought about by mechanization. That process is likely to happen again as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated.
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